Isolated for Six Months, Scientists in Antarctica Began to Develop Their Own Accent
In December of 2022, British contemporary artist Es Devlin installed a public sculpture in concert with the Endangered Language Alliance, “Your Voices,” outside of New York’s Lincoln Center. The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’s observation: “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem ... See more
Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report
The study is timely because Northern rhoticity is predicted to disappear in the next few generations, a process which is now complete in many areas of the South West," they added.
Ewan Gawne, BBC News • 'Strong R' in Danger of Disappearing Across North of England, Study Finds
researchers has just published "Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions" in Frontiers in Psychology .
Savannah Peat • Speech and Sun: New Research on Climate and How We Speak
Studies like this could also open new paths to insights into human societies, for example on the topic of migration. "If languages adapt to their environment in a slow process lasting thousands of years, then they carry some clues about the environment of their predecessor languages," says the Kiel linguist.
PhysOrg.com • Linguistics Study Claims That Languages Are Louder in the Tropics
Extreme cases like Icelandic (very slow change, with a replacement rate of only 3–4% per thousand years) and English (very rapid, with a 26% replacement rate per thousand years) challenged the utility of the “average” rate.